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Monday, 9 January 2012

Books you cannot Touch

I was reading in the paper at the weekend about Lady Antonia
Fraser’s holiday in Mexico. She got converted to Kindle when she saw all the
beautiful people using them. She realised she was the only one who was reading
a dog-eared paperback and that when it was finished she wouldn’t have anything
else to read.

I understand her sentiment and remember when I was
travelling around Asia the problem of what to read was never far away.
Sometimes I’d do a book swap and end up with some sub-Hobbit abomination. I remember reading
Peter Carey’s terrible book about a mouse (it’s Peter Carey so it has to be
good, right?), and am stilled scarred from reading A.S. Byatt. There were times when a Kindle would have been a
lifesaver.

But then I wouldn’t have made serendipitous discoveries such
as Howard Kunstler’s the Geography of Nowhere (which I got in a guesthouse in
Flores) or the works of Jose Rizal or R.K.Narayan, which I first read after trips
to bookshops in the Philippines and India. I would have missed out on the weird
randomness and social interaction of bookswaps, bookshops and
book-spotting.I’d have had the
convenience of a thousand books at my fingertips but there would have been losses
as well.

Dewi Lewis made a similar point when I talked to him about
small publishers last month, that for all the new methods of distribution,
marketing and selling, bookshops are still essential to the selling of
photobooks.

Many people liken the rise of small photobook publishers to
music and fanzine culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I remember that
time. I remember the local element of fanzines, the obscure records and the
labels that printed them. I also remember the record shops where you could buy
this stuff, the shops in Stockport and Manchester where I used to buy them, but
also the fact that every reasonably sized town in the UK had its own
alternative record store where you could get local fanzines, records and the
like. And that localness, that sense of place is what made fanzine and music culture so special. Manchester, Liverpool Leeds, Brighton, Coventry all had their own particular qualities that made them special. The music and the fanzines were the voice of the cities they emerged from.

In that respect, the new wave of small publishers is
nothing like the fanzine and music culture of the 1970s and 80s. For one thing, it doesn't have that essential local element. Secondly, much is made
of the necessity of the book as a printed thing, something that is tactile,
something you can touch and feel, but that rhetoric is contradicted by the lack
of availability. There is online distribution of books, but not the shops that
stock them. In the UK, there are some big city galleries and speciality bookstores
where some books will be stocked but the unless you live in London the availability
is strictly limited. The other major way of showing work, bookfairs, is very much a London thing at present.

In effect publishers are producing something tactile that
can’t be touched. And when you have books printed on newsprint, eccentric
bindings and printing techniques that can be patchy, one does need to see
before one buys.

Big bookshop chains are not the solution – they have their
own problems and seem unable to compete with the monster that is Amazon. So
what about small bookshops? Will they be able to meet the needs of small
publishers? And will they be able to do so on a truly national, not just
metropolitan, scale? I hope so.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

After Nirvana became successful and Kurt Cobain was a millionaire he was asked what he missed most, he said something along the lines of "the thrill of going to a second hand record store and discovering a rare Meat Puppets EP for two dollars"

Will the existence of all these indies help democratize "fine art" photography by no longer making the photographer reliant on commercial publishers- or will they ironically serve to restrict important work only to those who have access?